Basket Bondage?

It’s spring in full-tilt boogie. Where there are gophers, the trend has been to plant in wire baskets. In the past ½-inch aviary wire was used. While fairly easy to work with, it doesn’t last a long hardware cloth with regards to rust. There are some pre-made commercial wire baskets. They aren’t very deep, but the wire is studier than aviary wire.

The fear is what happens to the roots that grow thru the wire. As illustrated in my blog of 5/10/10, many roots are eaten at the wire’s edges. This makes the plant more like a container plant with the roots feeding only within the wire basket. Those that do manage to escape the cruddy teeth of the western pocket gopher have to deal with growing in and thru the wire.

The question is as the roots that grow thru the basket, as shown on the left, get harmed and is growth reduced? Wire can be included within the tissues of growing plants without apparent harm. The other photograph shows how an oak tree is slowly swallowing a 4” X 4” sign post.

In my experience a plum tree planted in a very shallow wire basket was greatly stunted. It failed to produce the thicket of long spindly shoots each summer. With all the other trees planted within 4’ deep & 3’ wide baskets, seems the trees a perfectly happy. They are the Asian pear, plum, plumcot, apple, and persimmon trees.

So it seems wire is simple swallowed up by the basket and the transport of water & nutrients up-and-down the tree remains relatively unharmed.



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Let me know what you think. Visit my web site to learn about my new book on drip irrigation and other gardening books. Thanks, Robert